Читать книгу The Firefighter Blues - Alan Bruce - Страница 16

After leaving the hostel, our first stop was a brief stay in a relatively modern house in Junction Road, Moorebank. It was a small fibro house situated on a large parcel of undeveloped land. Although the house was quite new, it still had the old, outside dunny. I used to pity the poor workers who did the rounds loading our can into their truck before moving on to the next house. I’m sure those workers were always given their own private spot at the bar when they went for a drink after work.

Our new address allowed my sister and me to continue at the same school, although our bus trip was now replaced by a twenty-minute walk through the local golf course. We trekked this path every morning and afternoon by ourselves, something parents of today would never think of allowing. I’m not sure which was the more dangerous, the walk itself, dodging the odd stray golf ball, or the swooping magpies that seemed to target us for weeks on end. Perhaps the black-and-white bombers were testing us; a secret initiation, a rite of passage for immigrants. I'm sure every Aussie kid can relate to the wind gush and clicking beaks of an angry, overprotective swooping magpie.

By this age, Jenny and I were experienced latchkey kids and would remain relatively independent our entire school life. My parents were always off to work well before we left for school and generally arrived home some time after us. There was an expectation that certain chores would be done before they got home, but I was usually too busy climbing trees or watching Mighty Mouse on the TV to do housework. This often resulted in a swift and very Scottish ‘skelp in the lug’, which loosely translates to a ‘smack in the ear’. If Dad executed it correctly, with cupped hand and precise timing, he would hit me on the side of the head and sometimes force a small amount of air to enter my ear. The pain could be excruciating. I’m not sure if he meant this to happen but happen it did – way too often. It would certainly be frowned upon these days but luckily no permanent damage was done. It probably wasn’t the best deterrent because I was still getting belted years later for similar misdemeanours.

Our six-month stay in Moorebank was initially quite unremarkable, but my family’s perception of our locality changed later in life. The reason for this … our next-door neighbours were the infamous Milat family. My sister and I went to school with George and Richard. The notorious Ivan, (the ‘Backpacker Murderer’) was quite a few years older and had possibly moved on by the time we arrived. No-one could imagine the horrors to come and, although we were neighbours and classmates, Jenny and I had very little to do with them as they tended to keep to themselves and our stay there was relatively brief. I do remember they were a very large family and, although we were all considered quite poor, they seemed a little worse off than most.

Late 1965, once our lease expired we left Moorebank for the Sydney suburb of Greenacre. Our new rental was a small HardiePlank house situated in a quiet cul-de-sac. It was a wonderful environment for children as there was no through traffic and all the neighbours seemed more close-knit than those in other suburban streets.

Jenny and I both attended Banksia Road Public School and, although I didn’t realise it at the time, this was also the start of my lifelong involvement with music. I joined the school recorder band and, along with Jenny, played descant and tenor recorder. We were taught by a wonderful music teacher, Mr Freidman, who would come to our school twice a week for band tuition. In the wrong hands, the recorder rivals an out of tune violin as the most annoying instrument known to mankind, but my sister and I mastered the intricate techniques quite quickly and we both learned to read music at a very young age. We even performed at Sydney Town Hall as part of a combined Primary School Concert. I know Mum and Dad were bursting with pride as they watched from the lush stalls of the concert hall. Music was in their blood and they seemed overjoyed that their children might carry on their legacy.

Once again, we would walk to and from school and for years we would arrive home to an empty house. We were used to it by now but most of our school friends found it odd that we fended for ourselves until six o’clock when Mum arrived from the bus stop.

During school holidays, Jenny and I had way too much unsupervised time to ourselves and this led to some pretty mischievous adventures. On one particular occasion, we decided to catch the bus to Roselands Shopping Centre. At the time, it was the largest retail centre in Australia. Our mission was simple:

We’re off to do a little shoplifting.

Just small stuff like chocolates, sherbets and any little toys we could smuggle under our clothes. I was nine and Jenny was ten years old. We certainly weren’t the brightest of criminals and definitely didn’t think things through – because Roselands was where our Mum worked as a preschool teacher. We were heading into dangerous territory.

On arrival, we quickly scoped out our target area, the confectionery counter. Things were going okay for a while, the odd cobber, freckle or redskin fell into our pockets but, like all petty thieves, we got greedy and were eventually caught by the shop security guards. I’m sure they were holding back laughter when we caved in and told them that Mum worked about twenty metres from where we were caught. Bonnie and Clyde, we were not.

I’ve never seen Mum more embarrassed than when we were marched into the preschool. We spent the remainder of the day with the toddlers in her care. Needless to say, we copped a sound belting from Mum and then another later that night when Dad got home. Sadly, we didn’t think of the consequences for our poor mother.

I remember her crying that night and saying to Dad, ‘I spend my days looking after everyone else’s bairns but cannie look after ma own.’

It wasn’t too long after that she quit the preschool and took up a job in a local factory with more forgiving hours. I’m still not certain that our little escapade was the only reason but I’m sure it influenced her decision. As I grew older, I also chuckled at the hypocrisy of Dad punishing us for being light-fingered. For as long as I can remember our house was adorned with beautiful little clocks and interesting mantel piece ornaments. Every now and then a new little bauble or trinket would appear, seemingly out of nowhere. Whenever I asked, ‘Where did that come from?’ Dad’s standard reply was …‘It fell off the back of a truck.’

Apparently, if furniture and other items were abandoned or left in storage for too long, his company would put them up for auction. I believe some of the workers may have participated in a little pre-auction ‘shopping’.

After all he was in the furniture ‘removal’ business.

Not all of our misadventures ended in punishment. Thankfully my parents sometimes saw the funny side but were usually reluctant to show us their true feelings.

Once again, around the age of ten or eleven, I was obsessed with making toy weapons; a spear, a catapult or a bow and arrow. My arsenal was made from the bits and pieces lying under our house. The manufacturing process was crude but I was happy as long as they worked and there was something to shoot.

Our home at Greenacre had several peach trees in the yard. One spring morning my sister and all the neighbourhood kids decided to pick the partially ripened fruit and throw them at me in retaliation for a recent attack with my homemade weapons. I also picked the fruit and threw it back at them if my aim was poor with the catapult. After a few hours, the trees were stripped bare and smashed peaches were lying all over the yard.

‘Oh well, no harm done, no-one eats them anyway,’I thought.

Later that night – I’m not sure of the time but it was dark – Dad arrived home from work. Just before we went to sleep he entered our bedroom and handed us an almighty lecture. He told us, ‘Don’t pick any peaches, leave them to ripen, yer Mum ’n’ me are gunna be eatin’ em and making jam and we’ll be giving some tae a few friends so dinnae be picking ’em. Leave them alone.’

My sister and I were shaking in our beds.

Dad hadn’t been out the back so he hadn’t seen the hundreds of mutilated corpses strewn across the lawn. After he said goodnight, Jenny and I hatched a foolproof plan. As usual, Mum and Dad were off to work early in the morning and as it would still be dark we had all day to put our plan into action.

Once they’d left, we scurried out the back in our pyjamas and picked up the squashed and disfigured peaches and quickly dispatched them over the neighbour’s fence. Anything left over that even resembled a peach we picked up, dusted off, and using sticky tape, began to attach them back onto the branches of the tree.

What a plan!

It would be weeks before Dad would notice and, who knows, they might even start growing again.

Pure genius, we’re brilliant!

A few days passed and nothing was said until one night we heard Mum and Dad in fits of laughter talking about our peach regeneration program.

‘Can ye believe what they bairns did? What were they thinking aboot?’ Dad chuckled.

Nothing was ever said to us at the time. It was never spoken about until years later when we all had a good belly laugh about it.

And, no, they didn’t grow back.